A simple celebration of what’s growing now
Cooking really doesn’t have to be complicated, and I think sometimes we overthink it.
In my experience, if you take vegetables that are in season, grown locally and harvested with care, they usually just work together. You don’t need to do an awful lot to them. Good ingredients already have their own flavour and their own story. Sometimes our job as cooks is simply not to get in the way.
Today I had a veg box from one of The Warren’s sponsors, Glasbren, and rather than deciding on a recipe first, I looked at what was there and cooked from that.
This isn’t really a recipe that needs to be followed to the letter. Think of it as a guideline. Use what you have, change the quantities, substitute vegetables and let the season decide what goes into the bowl.
Ingredients
* Beetroot, cut into chunks * Potatoes, cut into chunks * Courgettes, roughly chopped * Green beans * Kale, with the stalks and leaves roughly chopped * A tin or jar of cannellini beans, drained * Good olive oil * Sea salt
That really is it.
Method
Heat your oven to around 200°C / 180°C fan.
Start with the vegetables that need the longest to cook. Put the beetroot and potatoes into a roasting tray and roast until they’re beginning to soften and colour.
Next, add the courgette and return everything to the oven.
Towards the end of cooking, add the green beans and chopped kale stalks, followed by the kale leaves. They don’t need long. You want them cooked but still full of life.
Once everything is cooked, tip the warm roasted vegetables into a large bowl. Add the drained cannellini beans, a generous drizzle of olive oil and some sea salt.
Toss it all together, taste it, and serve.
More than a recipe
I truly believe we don’t always need to do much more to food than cook it in the way it wants to be cooked and put ingredients together that naturally belong together.
For me, cooking is about much more than feeding ourselves. It’s an expression of creativity and an appreciation of the people we’re serving. When I cook something for somebody, there’s a message in that. It’s a gift from me to them.
And choosing where those ingredients come from matters too.
Buying with the seasons from local farmers like Abel and the team at Glasbren is such a simple but powerful act. It connects what’s on our plates to the soil, the people growing our food and the landscape around us.
So don’t worry too much about following this recipe exactly. Open your veg box, look at what’s growing, cook it simply, put it together and see what happens.
That’s the recipe.